Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Whenever I was at the shop, I made sure Tamsin locked herself in. But you can only make a place so safe, can’t you? I’d forgotten the milk that morning, so I’d had to go out for the second time if we wanted our morning coffee. I’d found croissants and had bought a dozen. They were frozen, of course, but exotic enough for a town like Hills Point. I couldn’t wait to show Tamsin. Only, it wasn’t just Tamsin in the kitchen. She had company. An odd-looking man, bearded and black-hatted, wearing dirty, white oilskins and a dark waistcoat, and from the stink and colour of him, he hadn’t washed in months.

It was him, I knew, as soon as I saw him. He was the shift. This man had come through the time well and it had closed up behind him. Is that what it took to close a time well? Human sacrifice?

I tried to place him in time. Somewhere in the mid 1800s, I thought.

“Get you there,” he spat when he saw me.

I froze. Too many shocks piling one on top of the other.

“Get you there!” he yelled, “or you won’t be able to. I’ll do the same to you as I done to the shopwoman.”

So, he had killed Ruby.

“And that stupid girl who tried to bewitch me.”

Milla? Brave Milla.

“Oh, no!” Tamsin gasped.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Tell me,” he said. “Where be this?”

“Hills Point,” I told him. “You’re in a small town called ‘Hills Point’.” I could feel myself consciously slowing my speech, enunciating more clearly.

“Where be this?” he said again. “What country have I come to?”

I saw the tremor in his hands, the size of his pupils. If this man had come through the well, the passing through had changed him, you could tell. The symmetry of his face, his body, was slightly off, his colour wrong, his hair, up close, far thicker than normal hair.

And he blurred. I thought it was my eyes, at first, but no, holy hell, it was him. That’s right. When he moved he blurred. He got all pixelated and smeared-looking, almost as if he were lagging behind himself, as if, all around him, space, time were unstable. God, it was weird. Creepy weird. Scary weird. I wondered if it hurt, blurring like that. I was terrified he’d touch me and suck me into his pixelated lag space, almost more afraid of that than of being shot. But, most of all, I was afraid he’d hurt Tamsin. We had to be careful. This was a desperate man, a scared man, and probably an insane one. He had killed Ruby and Milla. Who knew what he was capable of?

“It’s Australia,” Tamsin whispered.

“Then why your foreignness?” he shouted. “I don’t believe you. You are not Englishmen.”

“We’re Australian,” I said. “Not English, Australian. And you, what are you?”

“British, of course, brought out here for something that weren’t my fault. And now, stuck here and hating the damned place. But towns like these. Why do we not know of these places?”

Tamsin slid down to the floor.

“Up!” he shouted.

“She’s afraid. Let her be.”

“If she don’t get up, she won’t never,” he threatened. I could see by his eyes he meant it. He was a man with nothing much to lose.

I helped Tamsin to her feet and held her there.

“Then, if this be Australia,” he continued, “this is where I stay. Not in that godforsaken, backbreaking wilderness I came from.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “You will probably have to stay. The, ah, road you came through has closed up.”

“But am I dead?” he muttered to himself. “Is this Hell?”

God only knows what private torment he was living in now.

“No, you’re not dead,” I said, trying to keep my voice as steady as I could. “But you probably shouldn’t stay in Hills Point. We are only a town of 30. You need to go somewhere bigger.”

I had no other plan but to get him away from us as far as possible. I had to get him away from Tamsin.

“Eh, bigger, you say. And where would that be on this lonely continent?”

“A town of thousands,”’ I said. “There are lots of towns like that. Somewhere you can be lost in the crowd. Somewhere no one can find you.”

“What you say makes good sense,” he said slowly. “So, I’ll need me a horse and a map and some supplies.”

And then I realised what I had just done. We had no horses, only cars. And this man couldn’t drive. He would need to be driven. He would need someone to drive him. He would need me to drive him.

“We don’t have horses,” I began.

“What do you take me for?” he yelled. “If you have no horses, how do you get around? Tell me!”

So, I began to explain cars and how things were different here.

“We are very advanced. Our carriages don’t need horses. But they are hard to drive. I will have to take you.”

He insisted on tying Tamsin up and locking her in the pantry before we left. I knew she was a resourceful woman. I hoped she’d be able to find some way to get out, for God knows when I’d be back. Or if. At least he hadn’t insisted she come with us.

Our car was just an old Falcon, but he seemed impressed enough with it. Afraid, even. He took a turn around the car several times, touching various parts of it. I opened the bonnet and showed him the engine. I tried to give a cursory explanation of how it worked, but I saw his eyes glaze over.

“You will need to sit in the back,” I told him. “And wear a belt.”

“Why must I?” he enquired belligerently.

“It is to keep you safe. These carriages go much faster than a horse.”

I settled him in and put his belt on, being very careful not to actually touch him. Up close, his stench was overpowering. What was it? Sweat, of course, months, years of drying, stale sweat. And a godawful diet of rabbit. And something chemical, too, that I couldn’t readily identify. But it was definitely the worst thing I’d ever smelled in my life.

“Your name,” I asked. “what is it?”

“What’s it to you?” he snarled.

“This will be a long trip,” I said. “We might as well get to know each other.”

He nodded. “William Stanley,” he said. “And you?”

“Jamie Straughan.”’

If he knew me as a real person, I reasoned, he might be less likely to bash my head in.

“Get me to the next town safely, Jamie Straughan,” said William Stanley, “and I will let you go free.”

I had to wonder whether that was true.

I started the engine and headed off down the main road. It’s now or never, I thought. Just before the intersection, I veered left, doing a hairpin turn and taking the dirt road as fast as I could down towards Sweetheart’s Walk, dodging trees and flying over rises, the old girl feeling every bump. I only hoped William Stanley would not realise what I was up to in time to shoot a great hole in the back of my head. I took us straight for the deep well, only jumping from the car at the final moment. I had made sure not to put my own belt on. I rolled over the long grass, winded and dazed. I watched as the car crossed into the well and, once in, push through what appeared to be dense grasslands, on and on. I continued to watch as the air heaved and buckled and the well popped, and man and car vanished. What would William Stanley find, I wondered, in that place, that time?

It took me an hour to get back home. I’d done something to my knee and could hardly put weight on it, and I could feel blood gushing from the back of my head.

“Oh, God,” Tamsin said when she saw me. “I felt it. I thought you’d been taken. Oh, God.”

“I lost the car, Tamsin,” I told her. “Sorry.”

“You silly thing,” she laughed, hugging me, crying. “I never liked that car, anyway.”

I looked his name up later. He had come through wrong, all right, but he had been wrong to begin with. He had been convicted of murder and sent to Australia for life. But he had been suspected of many murders. These days, we would call him a serial killer.